✖ Via Modcult: FOLK PHOTOGRAPHY: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905–1930
by Luc Sante (paperback, 160 pages, 127 photos) (Amazon)
About the book:
“In rural America at the beginning of the twentieth century, the worldwide postcard craze coincided with the spread of light, cheap photographic equipment. The result was the real-photo postcard, so-called because the cards were printed in darkrooms rather than on litho presses, usually in editions of a hundred or fewer, the work of amateurs and professionals alike.
They were not intended for tourists, but as a medium of communication for the residents of small towns, isolated on the plains and in the hills. The cards document everything about their time and place, from intimate matters to events that qualified as news. They show people from every walk of life and the whole panorama of human activity: eating, sleeping, labor, worship, animal husbandry, amateur theatrics, barn-raising, spirit-rapping, dissolution, riot, disaster, death. Uncountable millions of them were made in the peak years, 1905 to 1912.”
Read more over at the publisher website.
About Luc Sante:
“Luc Sante is a writer and critic. The author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990–2005 (2007), and several other books, he is also visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. His latest effort, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard, 1905–1930, is out now from Yeti Books.”
Read an interview with Luc Sante over at artforum.com
• Mar 24, 2010 link notes tagged: photo amateur vernacular postcard history America book author technology everyday common folk
